<\/p>\n
Until the middle of the 20th century, factices were often crafted by luxury glassmakers including Baccarat and Lalique to be exact replicas of their regular-sized counterparts, filled with colored water or alcohol to mimic the look of actual perfume. They grew bigger and bolder through the \u201970s, \u201980s, and \u201990s, but by the early 2000s, their production had begun to peter out. Not only were they prohibitively expensive to produce, but the whole culture of retail had begun to shift.<\/p>\n
Gupta\u2019s obsession with factices began like something from a fairy tale. When he immigrated to the United States from India in the early 1990s, he took a job at a perfume wholesaler on Canal Street in New York City, hoping to earn enough money to save for a master\u2019s degree in engineering. One fateful day, he was sent to the basement to clean\u2014and that\u2019s where he saw his first factice. \u201cIt was sitting on a shelf, covered in dust,\u201d he says. \u201cI had no idea what it was, but it felt as though it was calling to me.\u201d<\/p>\n
Gupta asked his boss if he could buy the bottle, and the man laughed at him: \u201cHe told me it was none of my business. But I kept asking, until finally he said he would take $2,000 for it.\u201d It took Gupta a year to save the money on his meager salary, visiting the basement every day to gaze upon the treasure. \u201cI didn\u2019t know why I wanted the bottle or what I was going to do with it. I just loved it. That was the start of my journey,\u201d he says. \u201cThirty-three years ago.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Until the middle of the 20th century, factices were often crafted by luxury glassmakers including Baccarat and Lalique to be exact replicas of their regular-sized counterparts, filled with colored water or alcohol to mimic the look of actual perfume. They grew bigger and bolder through the \u201970s, \u201980s, and \u201990s, but by the early 2000s, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1945,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1944","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-beauty"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sasgai.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1944","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sasgai.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sasgai.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sasgai.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sasgai.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1944"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sasgai.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1944\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sasgai.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1945"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sasgai.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1944"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sasgai.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1944"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sasgai.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1944"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}